Recently in Common Core Category

July 13, 2016

I thought it might be worth dusting off a column I penned in May of 2012, "The Fate of The Common Core: The View from 2022." Would be curious to hear where readers thought the piece was prescient . . . and where it wasn't.

July 31, 2014

Tuesday's POLITICO piece by Stephanie Simon, "Moms Winning the Common Core War," featured earnest Common Core advocates explaining that, to get things back on track, they need to stop being so darn principled and start appealing to the "heart." What's kind of wild is that, each time the Common Core advocates say, "We get it now," they make me think that a) they totally don't get it, and b) they're about to dig themselves into an even deeper hole. As best as I could discern, here's a distilled take on what the Common Core advocates had to say.

June 10, 2014

It's been a tough stretch for the Common Core. South Carolina and Oklahoma have followed Indiana in abandoning the enterprise. North Carolina may be about to join them. Education Week's Catherine Gewertz reports that, as things stand, just 42% of K-12 students will be assessed using PARCC or Smarter Balanced next year. On Sunday, the Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton penned the kind of measured but skeptical big media dive into the hows and whys of the Common Core that Mike McShane and I have urged but which has been hard to find. Now, if you're a regular RHSU reader, you know that none of this should be terribly surprising.

May 01, 2014

The past couple days I've run pieces by PARCC's Jeff Nellhaus and SBAC's Joe Wilhoft that helped illuminate how their consortia are going to address some key challenges when it comes to making sure that the new Common Core tests can carry the load they're being asked to bear. I found the exchange somewhat heartening, after years during which my questions had been genially (and sometimes not so genially) brushed aside. Having read the responses by Jeff and Joe, I have a few additional queries.

April 30, 2014

A few weeks ago, I asked three questions about how confident we should be that the results of the new, quasi-national, computer-assisted Common Core tests will be valid and reliable enough to support stuff like teacher evaluation and school accountability. Today I'll be publishing a response from SBAC's Joe Wilhoft.